Karl Puschmann: Slacker heaven dead and no one even cares

Shiny discs can replace bulky tapes, but you can't put the web on the shelf and charge $8 a night for it. Photo / Thinkstock

Bureaucracy at the struggling video store was the final straw, writes Karl Puschmann.

It saddens me to announce that one of our most beloved cultural institutions is dead. Once vibrant and thriving it slowly decayed for years but nobody took much notice and cared even less.

Basically, no damns were given. And now it's too late. It's done. Gone. Kaputski.

Sure, a few indomitable stragglers remain, holding the line, but at this point it would be folly to deny that New Zealand's once great Video Shop is anything other than dead. Which means, by extension, so am I.

Not literally, of course. I'm not a ghost of anything other than a cultural movement that is now officially over. Its fate and that of the humble video shop is inescapably intertwined. Its passing heralds the fact that my people are also on the way out, making this a very sombre and upsetting time indeed.

I should really get a Twitter hashtag trending. And I would. If I could be bothered. Which I can't.

If there's one problem with being a long-term subscriber to slacker philosophy that's it right there. Given the choice between doing something and doing nothing the latter wins every time. Even when facing cultural extinction.

Still, I can't complain. That would take too much effort. Besides, us slackers had a good run. Well over two decades if you take Richard Linklater's 1991 cinematic manifesto Slacker as its official cultural birth.

By sitting around doing nothing but evading duties and responsibilities we've outlived countless upstart scenes. We watched them come and we watched them go. But mostly we watched movies and talked a lot. That meant a lot of time spent in video shops. Browsing, arguing, renting. Living.

But watching movies and sniping cynically with detached irony doesn't pay. Not until you follow the natural slacker career path and find work in the media. That wasn't an option back then so I found myself looking for employment. As per the slacker code I didn't look far. I clocked in for work at Hollywood Connection Top 40 Video when I was 17, transforming the store from hangout to lifeblood. No other job pays you to mooch around and talk about films all day, which is how the video shop became the cultural heart of slackerdom.

This trend was picked up by slackers around the globe and best documented in Kevin Smith's scene-defining 1994 flick Clerks, a mirror of the movement.

Video shops have been closing for a while now but it took the recent distressing closure of the Mecca of movie rental, the Ponsonby Rd Video Ezy, to officially proclaim them dead.

They survived the costly DVD revolution and the Blu-ray transition but like countless other industries couldn't survive the internet. Shiny discs can replace bulky tapes, but you can't put the web on the shelf and charge $8 a night for it. Broadband's convenience and lack of late fees proved to be a double blow disruption from which there was no coming back.

Before hearing about Mecca's closure I could see the writing on the wall for us both. In a last-ditch shot at survival I decided to go against the slacker creed and do something. So over the holidays I joined the local video shop. Or, rather, I tried to.

I expect some unfriendliness from the staff, that's part of the experience. But the old man behind the counter was not a fellow slacker. He was a struggling business owner. Which only served to make his demeanour more perplexing. I had two bits of official plastic on me yet he insisted I not join his shop until I returned with a piece of paper with my address printed on it.

The shop was empty and dark and had bigger problems than quibbling over paperwork. On the wall a poster highlighted the big releases coming up in February, March, April. It was bright and filled with promise and nothing more than an advertisement of delusion.

With my symbolic show of solidarity stopped short by the man and the madness of his bureaucracy I found myself walking out of a video shop for the last time. I went home and streamed Clerks and even though I knew this was the end I tried to enjoy my final afternoon as a slacker by making the most of it and doing nothing.

The next day I drove to the hospital with my partner and a few days after that my daughter Poppy was born. She'll never know the archaic joys of a video shop but as all she does is lie around eating and sleeping, the future of slackerdom is once again looking bright.